Aderhold sat still, far back in Hawthorn Church. In his own mind he saw that he was on the edge of the abyss. He doubted much if he would escape.... The old farmer sitting, blue-smocked, beside him, his watery eyes fixed upon the minister, broke now and again into a mutter of repetition and comment. “Aye, aye! The misbeliever to perish for idolatry.... Of course he blasphemes—the misbeliever blasphemes.... Aye, aye! ‘Why,’ and ‘Wherefore,’ the Devil’s own syllables.... Aye, aye! Unbelief and sorcery go together.... Aye, now we’re at fire in this world and everlasting, lasting fire to come!” The preacher had before him a people who had come through a narrow strait and a valley of the shadow, gathered together in a mood of strained nerves, of twitches and starts aside, of a readiness to take panic. The day was dark with heat and oppression, a sense of hush before tempest. It was a day on which it was easy to awaken emotion. The faces of the people showed pale in the dusk, breathing became laboured. At last it grew that men and women looked aside with something like a shudder and a sigh in the dimness. It was as though they looked to see a serpent’s head, fanged and crowned, lifting itself in the gloom from monstrous coils. Aderhold saw the slow turning of eyes in his direction. He thought swiftly. He had served many in this congregation. Since, in the winter-time, his eyes had been opened, he knew of the drifting talk of his hoarding gold, of his practising alchemy there in the dark Oak Grange, alchemy, and perhaps worse. Even after his return from the plague-stricken town, even in his going through Hawthorn countryside from house to house where there were sick, helping, serving, even then he had seen doubtful looks, had known his aid taken hurriedly, as it were secretly and grudgingly. But all had not done so. There had been those too simple and too suffering and sorrowful for that, and there had been those whose minds seemed not to have taken the dye. There were some in this church of whom, in the years he had dwelt in this country, he had grown fond; folk that of their own bent felt for him liking and kindness.... But he did not deceive himself. He knew of none that would stand before this parching and withering wind. Heretofore the talk might have been idle talk, but now it was evident that Master Clement had at his shaken finger-ends the history in France of Gilbert Aderhold. Friends! By what multitude of written words, of hearsay and legend—by what considerable amount of personal observation did he know how friends fell away from the denounced dreamer of dreams!... Poor friends! He felt no rise of bitterness against them. They would not have fallen away in physical battle; they would have stood many a strain, perhaps all but this. This was not to cow the blood; it was to cow mind and the immortal spirit. To face for a friend a wolf, a lion, or an earthly angered King, that was well!—but to face for a friend an